Julie's Dream
by RansomRose77
Summary: Everybody dreams, right? Here is one character Stephen King left a little bit sketchy. I'm just trying to fill in some blanks. There is no reason this could not fit between-the-lines of canon.


Julie wandered through patches of corn with an over-arching blue sky as blue as her china-doll eyes. She pushed aside sheaves full of white silk to find her way; there was no path and the weaving green ocean seemed to go on forever. She had run into this dream—anxious, fleeing—but now she wandered. Lost, looking.

She stepped with care over the soddy ground and finally a haven was revealed between the parted rows. A tire swing twisted in the breeze, dangled from the knotty, stripped gray branch of an old apple tree. Beyond this slouched a gray shanty, its slanting porch set up on rusted jack-lifters. There rocked the oldest woman on earth. She was small and black and radiated warmth and welcome.

She set aside her guitar and gestured to the girl to come forward. "Child, who nailed you to that spot?"

"Nobody. I came her alone." Julie stepped forward, cautious but bold. She did not lower her head until she set on the second stair and the old woman pinned her in a hawk-eyed gaze. The misted eyes in that seamed face were sharp, sheened with light, and beneath them Julie broke her resolve.

"I did not do it!" she swore, falling down on her knees. She had to look away from that woman's eyes, looking at the weathered floor. "I swear I was innocent."

There were tears in her eyes, she was surprised to see. The old woman came to her, slow and bent. Her limbs creaked with arthritis as she raised herself on her cane. She put dry, age-cracked hands on Julie's head like a benediction and said with gravity, "It ain't your sin you've got—"

Julie looked up wildly, fear widening her eyes. "But it wasn't true! Daddy said I enticed him but I didn't mean to. He whipped me for tryin' to run off with Ronnie but Ronnie made me forget."

The old woman looked at her and looked at her hard. "You listen, you listen good, girl." Her words fell like chains, her words fell like dynamite. "You been loose, what may or may not have been. You fell in here out o' somewhere. What you gotta do, child, what you ain't got no business forgettin' is how mighty the Lord is. The Lord don't forget. You got redemption starin' you in the face. You got your choice."

"But I—" Julie insisted, her tears drying, her eyes slitting in defense.

The old woman stepped back, judgment in her eyes again. When she stepped back she revealed another shadow in the open doorway. Her gaunt old arm, slightly raised, pointed toward this one. "You take his hand; you got the choice."

Julie rose, swaying as the early summer breeze blew its warm breath through the corn, over the yard, through the rusted screen door open on its hinges and the young man standing there. She crossed the porch and placed her hand and a flood of memories shook her; she trembled and fell into his arms though he would not speak. He embraced her, very warm. The scent of him was clean and good. His arms were strong, his torso lean, his body hard. She was afraid to turn around, afraid to look up to the judgment in his eyes. They would be like _her _eyes. But she was good and safe there and nothing she had ever done mattered.

When she finally did turn around the old woman was smiling benignly at them, but on a dime everything switched. The breeze changed, the corn became still and a shadow crossed the sky like the shadow of a crow stilled in flight. It brought a new wind with it, sweeping in like a storm nurtured under the wing of this dark phantom bird. The sky darkened to slate gray. Rain began to fall so hard and clear, it seemed like stars pelting the corn. Small animals rustled and stirred and drops beat the tin roof, drumming it hollowly, painfully.

The face of the old woman, so frank and courteous before, became a cracked and frozen rictus of terror. She clutched her heart, the winkles in her skin parting, shriveling. The storm picked her up and carried her off like a dry sheaf of corn in the autumn wind.

Julie, who had stepped out of the warm, safe place the stranger's arms had opened her to, now looked back and found him gone. He had withdrawn into the shadows once more, or disappeared. In his place stood a dark and grinning Thing. Its eyes were bloody pits, its mouth a black cave and hellfire. It reached numbly out for her and she turned, ready to flee, ready to run through the corn, anywhere she could escape this _Thing_ … ancient and wretched creature it was.

She turned in that liquid way dreams have and nearly slammed into a square post shoring up the sinking roof. Past that, recovering, afraid to look back but knowing that Thing was in pursuit—she could feel the hot, fetid breath of It and the cold wind It brought—she found herself cornered in the yard, the corn closing in on all sides. Small snarling animals fringed the clearing, drawing her in. She sunk to her bottom hugging her bare knees, the tears streaming freely and unfocused, her back up against the knarled trunk of the apple tree.

And she woke.


End file.
